In Her Shadow by Louise Douglas Page B

palliative nurse was employed to stay overnight at Thornfield House, the impending death became the single most important topic of conversation in Trethene and at school. Other girls whispered about Ellen as we dawdled in the grounds, and now I was the one who turned to glower at them.
    ‘What are you staring at?’ I would ask, pushing my face into theirs.
    ‘She don’t seem to care,’ was what the girls usually said. ‘If my mum was dying, I’d be crying all the time. But she just gets weirder.’
    We would all look over at Ellen, who would be, perhaps, sitting on a bench, holding her knees and staring up at the sky.
    ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ I would reply. ‘You leave her alone.’
    Some girls tried to befriend Ellen, because they wanted to be part of the drama, they were fascinated by the proximity of death, but Ellen was not interested in them. She seemed to need only me, and that made me proud to be her friend and I felt more protective of her.
    It was true that her grief did not manifest itself conventionally, but I knew it was there. When she wasn’t being looked at, and judged, she depended on me for comfort. She bit her nails and shivered inside clothes that were suddenly too big for her. She came as close to me as she possibly could, all the time, as if to share my warmth. She put her hands into my pockets and I covered them with my bigger, warmer hands. Sometimes we squeezed into the same jumper, or we shared a cardigan, me taking one arm, she the other, and our bodies pressed together in between. I felt as if I was growing larger all the time, and Ellen, meanwhile, was disappearing. I was the big, fluffy mother hen, she the scrawny little hatchling.
    I liked it that I was the leader and protector now. I enjoyed the changed dynamic. I felt, at last, as if I was truly involved, and not just hovering on the sidelines.
    And all the time Ellen’s behaviour became stranger.
    When she was asked to read out her essay on ‘The Nature of Beauty’ in English, she stood up and recited a poem about a deer skull she’d found washed up on the beach and now kept on her dressing-table. It was, in fact, a sheep skull, but Ellen insisted it had been a deer. It was not even really a poem, more a random collection of words, like verbal driftwood. She didn’t get into trouble for that, nor for all the occasions she sat in class biting off her split ends and taking no notice of the teachers at all. They left her alone, they didn’t seem to know what to do with her. Even the sports mistress, Miss Tunnock, said nothing when she sloped off on her own instead of joining in with the cross-country running;rather, to my joy, she sent me off too, to look after Ellen. I particularly enjoyed the expressions of jealousy and outrage on the faces of our classmates as I trotted back to the changing rooms. Ellen and I found a warm place beside a radiator and huddled together, a coat buttoned up around both of us, a single scarf around our necks, so close that our heartbeats aligned themselves and shared the same rhythm.
    One afternoon, the school bus dropped us off and I was turning to go home to Cross Hands Lane when Ellen took my arm.
    ‘Walk back with me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you’ll be able to come in, but walk back with me anyway.’
    It was cold and the wind was blowing in our faces. We tucked our chins down into our scarves and linked arms. Our feet shared a rhythm, like our hearts sometimes did.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
    She shrugged. ‘My fingers hurt.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘It’s Papa. He makes me play the piano.’
    ‘Because your Mama likes to hear it?’
    Ellen nodded. I felt a tingle of irritation with her. Was it really too much to ask that she played her mother’s favourite pieces of music at such a time?
    ‘It’s not just for an hour or two, it’s all the time,’ she said. ‘Yesterday I had to play the Moonlight Sonata fifty times.’
    ‘Honestly, fifty times?’
    ‘It